The Phoenix Project: One company’s struggle to adopt a DevOps culture

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but is massively over budget and very late. Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.

The following is an excerpt from The Phoenix Project,a Novel about IT, DevOps and helping your business win. 25 lucky winners will get their own copy of The Phoenix Project, the seminal book about DevOps, courtesy of CloudBees (until August 28).

At the beginning of the book, there is a typical conversation within the subject company, Parts Unlimited, about the status of a project that is already more than one year late:

Director of QA:“I honestly have no idea. The code is changing so fast that we’re having problems keeping up.”

VP: “What do you mean ‘you can’t keep up’?”

Director: “When we find a problem in our testing, we send it back to Development and have them fix it. Then they’ll send back a new release. The problem is that it takes about half an hour to get everything set up and running, and then another three hours to execute the smoke test. In that time, we’ll have probably got three more releases from Development.”

Conversations like these happen more often than not, within many IT organizations today. However, with process automation and the transformation to a DevOps culture – where everyone works as a team toward shared goals – here is what an organization can achieve.

Parts Unlimited, the company highlighted in The Phoenix Project, adopted continuous delivery practices and a DevOps culture. Here is the difference:

VP of IT Operations:“The unicorn team is kicking butt. They’ve moved from doing the deployments every two weeks to every week, and we’re now experimenting with doing daily deployments. In short, we’ve never been able to respond to the market this quickly, and I’m sure there are more rabbits we can pull out of this hat.”